


If I Have Faith But Don't Believe

by QuentinFuckingColdwater



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - World War I, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Love at First Sight, M/M, Military AU, Work In Progress, prose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 01:20:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3959077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuentinFuckingColdwater/pseuds/QuentinFuckingColdwater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A chance meeting in the trenches of World War One changes the lives of a young blacksmith and tax accountant forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Have Faith But Don't Believe

**Author's Note:**

> I experimented a little with my writing style in this story.

Joining the Army felt right. After all, Dean Winchester had been following orders his whole life, and if he was totally honest with himself he wouldn't know what to do without someone directing his life.

_If only Castiel Novak hadn't allowed his father and brothers to talk him into joining the Army. He hated every moment of it. He despised the sergeants who yelled at him if his dress uniform wasn't perfectly ironed and his fellow recruits, many of whom didn't seem to have a mind of their home. Just because it was a family tradition to fight in whatever war happened to be going on at the time shouldn't have meant that Cas had to give up his perfectly boring life at home._

Before the war, Dean had been a blacksmith. He'd worked under his father and over his little brother. For a while at least, until Sammy had...No. He wouldn't let himself think about that.

_Castiel missed being an accountant. Numbers made sense to him, not people. Definitely not the Army. He missed spending time with his brothers. Even Michael, as fanatical as he could be about religion. The five of them: Michael, the oldest; Lucifer, the rebel; Uriel, the peacekeeper; Gabriel, the prankster, and himself, the baby of their family, had bonded into an inseparable unit after the death of their mother from Yellow Fever. Until the war had started, at least- Michael had enlisted, Lucifer had left the country, Uriel had followed their eldest brother into war, and Gabriel had ran away from it all._

Trench warfare was pure hell. Dean found himself trapped for days at a time, listening to German shells fall all around him and hoping that he would survive the next minute, the next hour, the next day. He could hear the screams of fellow soldiers as commanding officers ordered them to run directly into the path of enemy machine guns. He'd been alone for hours, maybe days. Time didn't have any meaning in hell. The sky was overcast, so dark is could have been night or maybe dawn. Dean had let himself drift off to sleep at one point, only to be woken by cold snowflakes drifting onto his face. Snow...it had to be around Christmas, then, he figured.

_"Get ready to go, boys. Give em hell," yelled the impossibly young sergeant in charge of Cas's small group of soldiers. He had no idea what had happened to most of the other men of his regiment; actually, he knew but he didn't like to dwell on the horrific deaths and maiming they'd suffered. The sergeant raised his short sword over his head (honestly, why were those antiquated weapons even issued anymore? Verses a machine gun, a man might as well have been carrying a stick) and hollered, "CHARGE!"_

Someone screamed for his soldiers to charge. They weren't too far way; the instincts instilled into him by his father and the Army officers who trained him told his body to answer the call, to join and rush at the enemy, guns blazing. But for some reason, a calm voice in his head that could have been his mother's whispered for him to wait, so he did, settling back down on his haunches and listening to the rattle of machine guns and the screams of the dying.

_Cas ran into hell. He crawled up the side of the trench, his rifle clinched in his hands. He remembered his commanding officers telling him to sleep with his weapon, shower with it, never let it leave his sight because one day it would save his life. What a flimsy object to trust his life to. Half-frozen mud sucked at his boots, tried to drag him back into the trench from which he came. Bright lights flashed in the distance, followed seconds later by the shrill whining of a German shell. 'Please, God, let it not be poison gas,' Cas prayed with his whole heart, with the conviction of his older brother, who'd gone before him in war and whose God had not protected him from losing a leg. But maybe the God of his father was being merciful today; not a single bullet touched him, even as his comrades fell screaming around him, tangled in barbed wire and left to die on the cold earth. Leaping over a coil of rusted metal, Cas's foot caught on something and he fell headlong into yet another of the endless trenches that seemed to stretched from France to Berlin._

'How long has it been since I prayed?' Dean asked himself. He honestly couldn't remember. As a boy, his mother had taught him the prayers her mother had taught her. He'd said his Our Fathers and even Hail Marys every night before bed. Until Mary Winchester had succumbed to the Yellow Fever that killed her parents and had almost taken Dean's little brother too. His father had grieved for years; honestly, John was still broken by the loss of his beloved wife. She'd been taken from them too soon... Dean was pulled from his morose thoughts by someone literally falling into his arms. He unceremoniously dumped the man on the near-frozen dirt and grabbed his rifle.

_Green eyes. The color of fresh-cut grass, of spring's first leaves. Cas felt his jaw open in shock as the man lifted his rifle to his shoulder, framing one over-bright eye with the weapon's open sights._

The brightest blue eyes imaginable stared back at Dean, wide with terror. The man's hands were thrown up in front of him and he scrambled back. "P-please don't shoot. I-I'm an American," he stammered, his voice so deep that Dean thought he felt a tremor in his bones. Underneath the dirt and blood and other stains that he didn't look to close at, he saw that the man's uniform was indeed of American design. He let the muzzle of the rifle lower slightly. "What's your name, soldier?" the man asked him. "Castiel Novak. Private Novak, sir." The younger man stood at attention and gave a shaky salute, though the fact that his helmet was ready to fall off his head made Dean smile.

_"Castiel, huh. Can I call you Cas?" Without waiting for a reply, he went on, "I'm Dean Winchester."The man was slightly taller than himself, dark freckles scattered across his skin like stars in the night sky. His features were perfectly symetrical, chiseled even. He was like an angel, too perfect for this hell they found themselves in._

Dean was hung up on Cas's eyes. Blue, the purest blue he'd ever seen. Was that the color of the July sky at midday? Or the thunderclouds right before they released rain and lightning on the earth? He honestly couldn't remember. He only knew the here and now, and that God had sent him an answer to his unspoken prayer.

**Author's Note:**

> So that was my first work after a year-long hiatus. Please leave a review and tell me what you think. Chapter two is currently being written.


End file.
